Here I talk about life and writing and my books, including The Tales from Atlantis book one Digging Up the Past and book two Reaching for Beyond. I give hints about what's to come and excerpts from current works.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Developing New Ways to Express Creativity:

I am all about creativity.At work there are often restrictions on how far you can take that
creativity, even if you’re in a creative job like mine.I always tell people, “they pay me to write
and take pictures, and it doesn’t get much better than that.”However, when you work in Law Enforcement,
you can only take that creativity so far.Choosing the right word, and taking the best picture you can while
dealing with topics where it is critical that truth and formality is maintained
most of the time can sometimes feel a bit limiting at times when you’re like me
and like to make things up.

This week, on the other hand, I’ve been developing a new
skill that while you are still seeking the truth of your best interpretation,
you still expend more creativity in the creation of what you hope is a good
likeness, composite drawing.You are
working from a description, and possibly pictures of facial features, to help get
an accurate impression of a person’s face.I’ve always enjoyed drawing, but since I’ve never had any classes, it
generally takes me longer than I have time for to get a drawing to a point
where I’m even remotely happy with it.This class cut down on that time considerably while giving me focused skills
for drawing composites.

I also feel like you just can’t have enough skills, and you
should never stop learning, so this class filled both those criteria, and took
me out of my comfort zone it an excellent direction.I am now a composite artist, albeit a new
one, who is still perfecting her skills, but I believe that all forms of
creativity merge, and the more you exercise your creative muscles, the better
honed they become, just like your physical muscles.

I’m hoping this will also speed up my progress on book two
of the Tales from Atlantis.It’s in
revisions, but there’s something, I just can’t put my finger on yet, that I
need to change, and I will not put it out until I figure it out.I want you to have only the best of me and my
work.I will include an excerpt that I’m
good with for a bit of a teaser.

Excerpt: Reaching for Beyond

Even when I pushed
past the emotions permeating the room, the blood and the darkness were still
there. Blood had soaked in to every visible surface in the bedroom, and
darkness flooded the place, reaching for me, trying to soak me in its slimy
energy. More blood stood in puddles where the floor and furniture had absorbed
all they could. What was left of the body was lying on the bed in another pool
of blood, and that increased my anger. It was hard to tell, but I thought it
had been a young woman. She didn’t look much more than twenty, but it was hard
to tell with her face distorted by her screams.

The fact that the
body was in pieces made it more difficult to tell for sure the victim’s gender
or age, but her head had fallen back when her throat was torn out, and even
though the killer had eventually severed it from the body, the head, still
seemed to be leaning back, screaming. Somehow, the killer affixed the head to
the headboard.Her torso was lying in
the center of the bed.I couldn’t really
tell what color the spread had been.It
was all dark red now.Her stomach was ripped
open, intestines, and internal organs spilling from it like so much spaghetti.

It was almost a warped parody of the human form.The heart had been extracted from the torso
and placed on top of it. The heart and torso, lying on the bed in the center of
the room, looked more like a gruesome centerpiece than something that had
recently been part of a human being. The arms and legs were almost shredded,
but you didn’t notice at first because they were separated from the rest of the
body.At first it looked like the victim
had been pulled apart because of the way all the pieces were separated.Body parts lay on the bed, on the dresser, in
the corners of the room, and under the window.As I focused on the heart, a pattern began to force its way through my
appalled senses and into my consciousness. The body hadn’t just been pulled
apart.There was method in this
destruction.